Why I Write: Fiction

This is the second installment in my summer series: Why I Write. Today I'll tell you why I write made-up stories about made-up people with made-up problems.

I wrote about the Power of a Story for my other blog, Quills and Inkblotts. The purpose of this piece today isn't to argue the merits of fiction. Rather, to explain why I choose to write it, or more accurately, why I need to write it.

I love conversation. Not idle chit-chat. I hate that. If small-talk were a sport, I'd be the last one picked for the team. Give me an interesting topic (and an interested listener) and I'll win the Olympics of conversation. But, put me in a room with doughnut holes and coffee and five minutes until church starts, and I turn into Socially Awkward Penguin.

Then Facebook was invented. It's a blessing and a curse, isn't it? I've had some great conversations there. I can respond at my leisure, after thinking about what I want to say. I can read over my words a couple times to make sure my meaning is clear (and my typos are fixed). In this way, it's a great tool for the socially awkward to engage in meaningful conversation.

Until it isn't.

A few months ago I came across a wonderful, thought-provoking article on the Magna Carta in the Wall Street Journal. You can read it if you want to (please do!). Turns out, last summer was its 800th anniversary--who knew?

I thought about that article all day, the implication of the document on me as an American, as a descendant of Anglo-Europeans, who are so often thought of as the oppressors by modern...let's say "intellectuals," and how that thinking came about over the last hundred years or so.

I shared the link to the article on Facebook, but not until after carefully planning what I would say about it. I didn't want to come across as a snobbish know-it-all. I genuinely wanted my little Facebook community to be as intrigued as I was by it, to read it, to form their own thoughts, and to have a conversation about it. Of course, no one did. It turns out people have lives!

Having a constantly churning mind and no one to share its ruminations with can be lonely and stifling.

Enjolras had his men of the ABC Society.

William Wilberforce had the Claphamites.

Hannah More had her Bluestocking Group.

I need an outlet too, a more reliable source of conversation than fickle Facebook. So I write fiction. I hold conversations with myself about the beauty of the Pilgrims, about their faith, about God's faithfulness to them, about what it's like to grow up with a father who doesn't easily show love, about being a girl in a patriarchal society, about love, about grief, about friendship, about having faith in a God who feels very far away.

And the voices in my head do answer. They have comebacks I would never have the guts to say. Sometimes they scream and cry. Sometimes they laugh and enjoy each other's company. Sometimes they fall in love.

Sometimes I don't know what I know, or how I feel until the voices have had their say. In some ways it's better than engaging real life people who grow bored, or get offended, or misbehave. The voices are enough. They do more than sustain me--they energize me. They keep me sharp, focused, interested in many things. They demand knowledge gained by research, and excellence gained by revision.

When no one in real life cares about the Magna Carta, or King James, or religious persecution in the 17th Century, or Reformation theology, or being a lovesick teenage girl, the voices do. They care because these things are their fictional lives.

These things are my life. Because I need to have these conversations. Because I write fiction.

"For I am full of words; the spirit within me constrains me. Behold my belly is like wine that has no vent; like new wineskins ready to burst. I must speak, that I may find relief."

Job 33:18-20